Court suspends Israeli govt's sacking of attorney general
Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the Cabinet's decision and addressed a letter to Baharav-Miara saying she 'should not try to impose herself
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NZ Herald
16 minutes ago
- NZ Herald
Israel's PM vows to expand military operations to occupy all of Gaza
Witkoff told hostage families in Tel Aviv that his proposal for a temporary ceasefire and the return of about half of 20 living Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza 'doesn't work and we've tried everything'. Trump, Witkoff said, 'now believes that everybody should come home at once. No piecemeal deals.' He said the Administration was formulating a new 'all or nothing' plan. Both sides have rejected elements of the Witkoff proposal that has been on the table. The State Department declined to comment. Details of the Administration's new approach - or the extent to which it is related to Netanyahu's new military plans - remain unclear, according to diplomats and hostage families who have been briefed by United States officials. Officials in Qatar and Egypt, which along with the US have been mediating talks between Israel and Hamas almost since the nearly two-year-old conflict began, said they were not aware of any new US ceasefire deal. While right-wing members of Netanyahu's Government have long supported a complete takeover of Gaza, senior security officials have repeatedly insisted that Israel has achieved its military objectives of eliminating Hamas' ability to govern Gaza or launch military offensives, according to Israeli media accounts. The IDF says it already controls more than 75% of Gaza, a densely populated territory of 365sq km. The United Nations has said that only 12% of Gaza is outside the Israeli militarised zone or areas not affected by IDF evacuation orders. The majority of Gaza's 2.2 million people now live in tent encampments in the southern part of the enclave. The IDF mostly has refrained from operating where Israeli intelligence indicates that hostages are being held. Hostage families and many Israeli security officials long have said that a negotiated agreement is the only way to bring the majority of the captives home. 'Netanyahu has decided to occupy the Gaza Strip, meaning that military operations will also take place in areas where hostages are being held,' said a person familiar with the prime minister's decisions who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Hostages freed from captivity have said in interviews with Israeli news media that their captors were under orders to kill them if they thought Israeli troops were approaching. Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is still held hostage in Gaza, wrote on X: '667 days that the hostages are enduring a Holocaust in the tunnels, and instead of reaching a full agreement to end the war - a feasible one - Netanyahu is preparing an operation that will turn the living hostages into bodies and make the fallen disappear.' Videos released by Hamas late last week of two hostages showed them extremely emaciated. 'You see your child dying before your eyes and you can't do anything,' Ofir Braslavski, whose son Rom Braslavski was shown in one video, told the Associated Press. Some family members who met Witkoff in Tel Aviv said they thought the new plan he outlined in broad strokes was the best chance to lead to the release of all the hostages and an end to the war. 'This Administration inherited this phased framework,' which led to two temporary ceasefires and the release of more than 200 hostages under the Biden Administration, 'and were convinced by the Israeli Government that this was the best option for getting to a deal,' said Ruby Chen, the father of 19-year-old American Israeli Itay Chen, who was abducted by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel that sparked the war. 'But this Administration has taken six months and realised it's not a plan that they can execute, and they decided to shift and come up with a plan that has a better probability of success,' Chen told the Washington Post. The Israeli official said that 'the Prime Minister is pushing for the release of the hostages while pursuing a military resolution, combined with the delivery of humanitarian aid to areas outside the combat zones and, to the extent possible, to areas not under Hamas control'. Hamas' release of the videos of skeletal hostages came as international outrage has grown over images of emaciated Gazan children amid what the United Nations has said are near-famine conditions. Israel has restricted delivery of humanitarian assistance by international groups, instead supporting the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which runs four distribution sites in southern Gaza. Hundreds of Gazans have been killed as they pass close to IDF positions to reach the GHF sites, which are guarded by US security contractors. A number of Arab and European countries, joined today by Canada, have air-dropped food into Gaza. Jordan, which has also sent aid by road, today condemned what it called 'the deliberate obstruction' of convoys by Israeli settlers as the trucks travel through the West Bank en route to Gaza. 'This is not the first time such violations have occurred,' Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said, according to the official Jordan News Agency. Aside from the settler attacks, he said, Israel has placed severe restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to cross daily and has imposed convoluted approval processes, chaotic border inspections and newly added customs fees.
NZ Herald
9 hours ago
- NZ Herald
The 109-year-old pact that looms over European moves to recognise a Palestinian state
To many Arabs, who view it as a great betrayal, it seeded a legacy of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East. The real-time crisis unfolding in the Gaza Strip — the starving children, the Israeli restrictions on aid, the Palestinians killed as they try to collect food — undoubtedly had a greater impact on Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France than the stains of the past. Yet their momentous decisions have cast a light on the shadowy roles of both countries in a region where they once vied for influence. 'The history is so relevant,' said Eugene L. Rogan, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford in England. 'It shows there's always a chance for historical actors who screwed up in the past to make up for their mistakes.' Rogan praised the moves towards recognition for reasons both past and present. On its current course, he said, Israel was opening the door to unthinkable treatment of the Palestinians: expulsion from Gaza or worse. Recognising a Palestinian state does Israel a favour by opening the way to 'a form of cohabitation that is sustainable', he said. Speaking at the United Nations, the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, cited another century-old document in arguing that recognition would redress a historical injustice: the Balfour Declaration, issued a year after the signing of Sykes-Picot, which endorsed 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. It had a proviso that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine'. After 21 months of relentless Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the spectre of famine across the enclave, Lammy said that Britain had a responsibility to act on behalf of the territory's long-oppressed Palestinian population. 'His argument is that it's time to make good on the second half of that promise,' said Rogan, whose books include The Arabs: A History. 'At the time of the Balfour had a worldwide empire, which in 1917, they could not imagine losing. David Lammy is operating in a postcolonial, post-EU Britain. But he's using history as a legitimating factor.' Lammy said that Britain could be proud that it 'helped lay the foundations for a homeland for the Jewish people'. Yet the country's motive in backing what later became Israel was less moral than strategic, Rogan said. It was seeking a client community in Palestine that would prevent the territory from falling into enemy hands. London feared the territory could be used as a launchpad for attacks on the Suez Canal, which was then controlled by Britain. Moreover, Britain backed away from its pro-Zionist stance as it found it hard to reconcile a Jewish state with preserving relations with the Arab world. In a later document, the White Paper of 1939, Britain proposed that the Jewish homeland would be created within a majority-Arab Palestinian state and that Jewish immigration to Palestine be limited to 75,000 for five years. 'Israel was not created because of the Balfour Declaration; it was created in spite of the Balfour Declaration,' said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli American historian who served as Israel's ambassador to Washington and later as a deputy minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Oren argued that the decisions of Britain and France to recognise a state would not hasten an end to the conflict in Gaza but prolong it. By offering this concession to the Palestinians now, he said, the West had given Hamas even less incentive to agree to a ceasefire. He chalked it up to a bid for relevance by two postcolonial powers. 'These are former Middle Eastern powers that want to feel like Middle Eastern powers,' said Oren, who wrote Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. 'There's a pathetic quality to it.' Others argue that if these moves had no impact, they would not have drawn the furious reactions they did from Netanyahu and other Israeli officials. The addition of Britain and France — plus Canada and Malta, which said last week that they, too, would back recognition at the United Nations General Assembly in September — means that more than three-quarters of the UN's 193 member states will have recognised a Palestinian state. France had a less direct stake in Palestine than Britain did after ceding its claims in the Sykes-Picot treaty. But its move towards Palestinian recognition represents another fateful turn in its relationship with Israel. From 1945 to 1967, France was Israel's biggest backer in the West. Part of that was rooted in its wrenching experience with decolonisation. In 1954, France faced an anti-colonial uprising in Algeria, where the nationalists were backed by Egypt's nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. France, viewing Israel as a bulwark against Nasser, drew close, supplying the country with Mirage fighter planes and nuclear technology that became the foundation of its undeclared nuclear weapons programme. But in 1967, days before Israel launched a military strike against Egypt, de Gaulle, then France's president, imposed an arms embargo on Israel and shifted his gaze to the Arab states. Gérard Araud, who served as France's ambassador to Israel from 2003 to 2006, said that rupture cast a long shadow. 'I felt there was always a sense of 'Don't trust the French,'' he recalled. By supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the United States had in any case supplanted France as its No. 1 ally. France went on to become the first Western country to develop close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which represents Palestinians internationally and is led by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The decision to recognise a Palestinian state nevertheless carries significant political risk for Macron, Araud said. France has both the largest Jewish and the largest Muslim communities in Western Europe. It has been scarred by a string of Islamist terrorist attacks. In recognising Palestinian statehood, historians said, France and Britain would do well to recognise their diminished sway over a region they once ruled. Such recognition was sorely lacking for decades after the authors of Sykes-Picot divvied up the Middle East, with lasting consequences. 'Neither country understood that the age of colonialism was over,' Araud said. 'They behaved as if they were still all powerful. It's not the most glorious page of history for either country.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Mark Landler Photographs by: Saher Alghorra ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
NZ Herald
10 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Court suspends Israeli govt's sacking of attorney general
The Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a vocal critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only for a court to immediately suspend the move. Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the Cabinet's decision and addressed a letter to Baharav-Miara saying she 'should not try to impose herself
